VERDUN, France (AP) – France’s president and Germany’s chancellor want their countries’ improbable friendship to be a source of hope for today’s fractured Europe as they commemorate the centenary of the longest battle of World War I.
In solemn ceremonies Sunday in the forests of eastern France, Francois Hollande of France and Angela Merkel of Germany are marking 100 years since the 10-month Battle of Verdun, which killed 163,000 French and 143,000 German soldiers and wounded hundreds of thousands of others.
Between February and December 1916, an estimated 60 million shells were fired in the battle. One out of four didn’t explode, and remain in the soil. The front line villages destroyed in the fighting were never rebuilt. The battlefield zone still holds millions of unexploded shells, making the area so dangerous that housing and farming are still forbidden.
With no survivors left to remember, the commemoration now focuses on educating youth about the horrors and consequences of the war. Some 4,000 French and German children will take part in Sunday’s events, which conclude at a mass grave where French President Francois Mitterrand took German Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s hand in 1984 in a breakthrough moment of friendship and trust by longtime enemy nations.
Merkel said Saturday the event shows “how good relations between Germany and France are today” and the achievements of European unity.